


Crime and Punishment

by LHS3020b



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Alternative conversation, Asari Characters, Gen, Prothean Beacon, Thessia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-17
Updated: 2014-09-17
Packaged: 2018-02-17 19:57:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2321450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LHS3020b/pseuds/LHS3020b
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Commander Alice Shepard met with the asari councillor after the events of the coup attempt, she wasn't entirely happy with what she was told.</p><p>This is the conversation I wish we could have had concerning the Thessia beacon.</p><p>(It also references another outstanding fic project of mine, "Sideways to Zero", but StZ isn't essential to make sense of this.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crime and Punishment

Commander Alice Shepard stared at Councilor Tevos with unconcealed shock. ‘Let me get this straight,’ the commander said. ‘You’ve been sat on a working prothean beacon – for nearly three thousand years? And you didn’t think to mention this to anyone?’  
They were stood on the balcony in what, until recently, had been Councilor Udina’s office. Behind the window-wall separating the room from the balcony, his old decor was still there, complete with his desk and all the little items strewn over it. The room was a mess, though - C-Sec had ransacked it as they searched for evidence relating to his role in the recent coup attempt.  
The asari councillor was doing her best ‘ageless and superior’ routine - Gianna Parasini’s description had stuck in Alice’s head, even though their last meeting had been many months ago and many light-years away on Illium. Tevos had the composure of an iceberg, or possibly a particularly-blue shark. Alice didn’t like it. She would trust the asari perhaps half as far as she could be thrown.  
Tevos’s only response to Alice’s barb was a slight raise of one of her perfectly-groomed eyebrows. ‘It was considered,’ she said blandly, ‘but it was felt that the time wasn’t right.’  
A skycar shot past, casting a tiny shadow over the Presidium lake many floors below. The roar of its engines sounded in their ears as a swirl of displaced air washed over them. It brought with it the scents of the flowers in the balcony’s pots. The sweet odour was oddly dissonant with their current discussions.  
Alice realised she had her fists balled. Her mood was hazed with rage. She took a conscious effort to try to relax, taking a slow, deep breath. Her mind was filled with visions of Eden Prime, of the fiasco at the dig site and most of all, Jenkins’ death. All that - had it literally been for nothing?  
‘You deceived us,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it. You lied to all of us. All of you!’  
One sick, horrible thought nagged at the back of Alice’s mind. Liara - did she know about this? Had she been in the know? For the love of all the gods Alice didn’t believe in, she hoped that Liara had known nothing.  
‘Oh, not all of us,’ Tevos said. ‘Not even very many of us, in fact. Only a few people in the Civil Service and academia were in the know. Responsible, trustworthy people. We couldn’t let loose canons near a find of this magnitude.’  
‘Loose canons?’ Alice felt a moment of incomprehension. Then, suddenly, she realised what Tevos was implying. ‘Wait - the Civil Service? Academia? You didn’t even tell your own governments, did you?’  
Tevos turned around and rested her hands on the balcony rail. Her face was impassive. She scanned her eyes over the far side of the Presidium. ‘The republican assemblies,’ she said, ‘aren’t always ... reliable. They have their own views, and the passions of the mob can’t always be restrained.’  
‘You mean the democracy doesn’t always vote the way you want.’  
‘I mean that sometimes the people don’t - can’t - have access to the full facts. They can’t appreciate the situation quite like we do. They just don’t have the breadth of knowledge or the skills to make the right calls. Certain facts sometimes have to be ... held back. We never lied to anyone. We just didn’t tell them. Silence is not an untruth.’  
Slowly, Alice shook her head. Somewhere out in the air, she heard a bird cawing. Idly she wondered how the things got onto the Presidium. You saw them, flying about. Someone must have released them in here at some point. Presumably they fed themselves by scavenging on scraps from the restaurants and rubbish bins, much like city pigeons back on Earth.  
Earth. Now there was a thought that Alice didn’t want to have right now.  
Tevos seemed to take Alice’s silence for assent. ‘Come now Commander - surely you can see the sad wisdom of our position? The beacon - it was an unknown quantity. It could be - destabilising.’  
‘ “Destabilising”,’ Alice said. The word was leaden on her tongue. It tasted like dust and ashes. It felt like rage and despair, rolled together. ‘Well, for destabilising, how do you like a fucking Reaper invasion?’  
‘We can’t change the past-’  
‘Don’t give me that bullshit,’ Alice barked. Tevos flinched backwards, blinking in sudden fright. She half-raised her hands before her composure reasserted itself. Alice continued, ‘You used the beacon, didn’t you?’  
A shadow passed over Tevos’s face. She sighed. ‘It was dug up during the Mount Protheos excavations. Early in the asari space age. We weren’t able to access the beacon directly, of course.’  
‘The Cipher,’ Alice said.  
Tevos nodded. ‘Yes, though we didn’t know what was missing until you came along. At the original excavation, a - what you would call a gradate student, working for one of the researchers there. She apparently tried to meld with the beacon. It didn’t work. She survived, but suffered brain damage.’  
‘Sounds bad,’ Alice said.  
‘It was. The records are muddied over all this time, but the student eventually committed suicide. She left behind a very strange final conversation with her supervisor. Apparently the experience was very damaging. Kiara Lexian never made a clear recovery. It seems by the end she was having fugues and hallucinatory episodes.’  
Alice remembered the fragmentary visions she had received on Eden Prime. Images of horror, an inchoate sense of fear, noises and sounds and a sick all-consuming sense of helplessness. But nothing really concrete, few solid impressions. It was the sort of thing that could easily unhinge an unprepared mind. Alice had perhaps been slightly more prepared then most - Torfan had left her inured to scenes of horror.  
Tevos said, ‘That experience left people ... dubious .... about attempting a direct connection. Since we couldn’t access the data directly, we had to approach the beacon gradually.’  
‘What did you do?’ Alice asked.  
Tevos nodded, as if welcoming the technical question. Certainly it had to be more comfortable for her than the moral questions this also raised. Alice noted that she couldn’t care less whether Tevos felt comfortable right now.  
‘We were able to study its structure,’ Tevos said. ‘X-rays, particle scintillation, chemical analysis, that sort of thing. It was made out of composites unknown to that era’s science - but their existence implied how to make them. We learnt a lot about integrated circuitry from its innards. The ways it used mass fields gave us clues about how to integrate eezo into space drives. It was by direct study of the beacon’s engineering that we learnt how to break the tyranny of the Rocket Equation, for instance. Also the inscriptions on it clued us into the existence of the Thessia Relay.’  
‘Inscriptions?’  
‘There were diagrams. Perhaps technical, perhaps originally just decorative. Their inscribers’ intent doesn’t matter at this juncture. One of the researchers on the Protheos team was actually an astronomer - apparently Dr. T’Saith was taking a sabbatical from her usual studies. It was a long time ago, some of the biographical details are a bit confused. Anyway she recognised one of the diagrams as a -’ Tevos’s face frowned as she concentrated ‘- what did they call it? Oh yes, that’s it - a “logarithmically-scaled plot of the Parnithan system”. But instead of stopping at Tevura, it marked something orbiting further out. In what you’d call the Kuiper Belt.’  
Alice nodded slowly. ‘The mass relay,’ she said. ‘Like what we thought was Charon, in our native solar system.’  
Tevos nodded. ‘Quite. Anyway, you understand most of these details are ... different in the official accounts. The excavation team were split over what to do. The radicals like T’Saith and T’Resh wanted everything published now. But mercifully, the financial backers of the expedition were more cautious. They saw an opportunity, but also a peril. Some of them wanted the area demolished with explosives.’  
‘You mean they saw a threat to their economic powerbase, and they wanted it airbrushed away. The Stalinist approach to historical truth.’  
‘Oh come now, no need to be so cynical. Technological revolutions are called revolutions for a reason. If it is to be kept safe, change has to be managed.’  
‘So the scientists were stopped from doing their work by the money men, is that what you’re saying?’  
‘No, not at all. A compromise was worked out. Research could carry on, but it would be done in private. That way if anything harmful was discovered within the beacon, the dangers could be contained. We had no idea what it could portend. No-one wanted to see Thessia threatened. Remember that it was found amongst the wreckage of a prothean encampment. On the edges of what was identified as a nuclear bomb crater.’  
‘A nuke?’ Alice felt her own eyebrow rise. Another skycar rattled past. She felt it thrum through the tiles beneath her feet. ‘Really, Tevos? Weapons of mass destruction, used in Thessia’s distant past? Would I be right in guessing this beacon was something like fifty thousand years old?’  
Tevos winced. ‘Yes, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s obvious that the prothean facility was destroyed during the last Reaper cycle. The residual isotopes make it clear that Teleanis Chasma was never a natural feature. Our best guess is a ten-kiloton fission device. Probably of the gun type, but it’s hard to be sure at this remove.’  
‘Bad enough to knock a hole in the local landscape,’ Alice noted, ‘but not enough to set off any kind of general ecocatastrophe.’  
One of the strange things about the Reapers was that they could be weirdly parsimonious with their use of force. The Bahak Relay explosion had proven beyond any doubt that the literal destruction of entire solar systems was technologically-possible for them - but they didn’t seem to use that power. The mysteries underneath all of this were one of Alice’s greatest frustrations during this war. Maybe it was her engineering background that drove her so, but Alice hated unanswered questions. There were maddening hints of structure and pattern, but nothing really concrete. Somewhere under this sick mess lay the truth – somewhere!  
‘Yes,’ Tevos agreed. ‘Anyway, the official accounts didn’t need much editing. The public were even shown some photos of the beacon. Our predecessors just called it an “inscribed obelisk” - which it was. And of course one of those inscriptions led us to the Thessia relay. The subsequent technological expansion was ascribed to scientific discovery catalysed by the relay - again, not actually untrue.’  
Just for a moment, a maddeningly self-satisfied smirk rippled across Tevos’s face. The flicker of emotion was gone again, replaced by her usual icy impassivity.  
Alice said, ‘Clearly your people are masters at lying with half-truths.’  
Tevos looked exasperated. ‘Commander, this display is-’  
Alice turned around and punched the glass window behind them. The window shuddered. A filigree of cracks radiated out around her knuckles, clinking and crackling as the glass strained.  
Tevos stared.  
Alice turned back. ‘Councillor,’ she said, ‘you covered up one of the biggest discoveries in galactic history. You kept it covered up. Later on, this council passed ordinances demanding that anyone else hand over other prothean discoveries to its agencies, or face censure. I can’t imagine the motives for that were wholly-pure, were they? You used scavenged beacon-technology to kick start your own mass effect-based industrial revolution. Then you pulled the ladder up after you, so that no-one else could benefit like you did.’  
‘Commander-’  
‘No, Councillor, I’m not finished yet!’ Alice realised she was raging. She also realised that she didn’t care. ‘You can damn well shut up and listen! Then along comes Eden Prime. How you must have been laughing at us the whole time! Did you come clean then? No! You still had money to make on your own technology patents. Then when we went to Ilos, you did nothing.’  
Alice took a breath, trying to keep hold of her raging emotions. She remembered that tense, terrifying journey through the ruined catacombs of a dead culture. She remembered that final, horrifying conversation with Vigil, as the full nature of Sovereign’s threat became belatedly clear. She remembered that last, desperate rush back to the Citadel.  
Her voice dropped. ‘Damn you,’ she said. ‘Your beacon probably had a warning in it, like the others. If it had been studied properly, openly - perhaps that warning would have been heard. We would have known the Reapers were coming. The galaxy could have prepared.  
‘Hell, you could even have come clean when the war started. But no, you didn’t. Earth is in ruins. Palaven is under siege. There’ve been incursions as deep into the galactic disk as Sur’Kesh. Billions are dead already. The galactic economy is on a knife-edge - I know we’ve got less than a year before what’s left of our governments go bust! People are terrified and panic is starting to break out. Even here on the Citadel, food supplies are running out and the refugees just keep coming. Every day we have fewer and fewer ships - and you said nothing!’  
Her fists were balled again. The look Alice was giving Tevos was barely a step short of the one she gave people she meant to kill. Tevos’s composure finally started to crack. Like an iceberg calving from a glacier, real fear started to creep into the asari matriarch’s eyes.  
‘Was it worth it?’ Alice asked. ‘No - don’t answer that. Clearly you thought it was. The extra profit you could squeeze from the patents - but that makes no sense. If that’s your motive, you were stupid beyond words. The Reapers are slaughtering the customers who buy your goods. Are you actually greedy enough that you think you can sell knock-off cuttlefish tech to Harbinger?’  
As Sovereign had pointed out so bluntly, two years ago, most modern technology was in effect scavenged Reaper tech. That was one reason why the enemy’s attacks were so devastating - the enemy knew exactly what toys the opposition had, better than the opposition themselves. For the galaxy’s synthetic opponents, there were no mysteries and no unknowns. Their superiority in that regards was total.  
Another thought occurred to Alice. ‘And this is why you’ve ridiculed people like Matriarch Aethyta, isn’t it? It’s why Liara was frozen out of her career of choice, isn’t it? You think you have all the answers and all the power, from your pet beacon.  
‘How many people,’ Alice asked Tevos, ‘have died because of your greed?’  
Something seemed to break in Tevos’s eyes. Her shoulder sagged. She seemed to fold in on herself. Somehow she appeared far older and far more tired then she had a moment ago. ‘We were scared,’ she admitted. ‘And foolish. We ... well, to tell the truth, we panicked. Scared people do stupid things. We clung to what had worked before, tried to continue on our previous path.’  
‘You were trying to manufacture a controlled crash,’ Alice guessed. ‘The asari are economically strong, but you’re not all-dominant. There are checks on your power. The scientific might of the salarians. The military power of the turians. The threat of the krogan as well, I suppose. But you wanted more. You rule jointly now, but that wasn’t enough, was it? You were angling for dominion. And you thought you could use the Reapers to remove the competition for you.’  
Tevos looked down at the floor, then away. Her stance radiated shame.  
Alice continued, ‘You thought you could weather the storm, sheltering behind the power of your secret beacon. I guess you thought the Reapers would blunt themselves against the turians, against us - and then you could move in and pick them off.’  
‘We thought - we thought if we had more time - by the Goddess, the answers had to be in there! We thought the protheans must have known! Maybe they found out too late to help themselves, maybe they bungled the implementation - but we just couldn’t believe they didn’t know!’  
‘When we found the Crucible plans on Mars,’ Alice said, ‘that reinforced your belief, didn’t it?’  
‘Actually, no,’ Tevos said. ‘We thought the Crucible plans were a fraud. Some of my advisors thought it was another human plot - you were going to demand extra seats on the Council, or something. Some others thought the Crucible was a fake - a Reaper plant, perhaps. You have to admit, finding a complete set of schematics amongst ancient ruins is overly-convenient.’  
Amongst her indignation, Alice felt a moment of unease. The funny thing was, Tevos’s remarks echoed some of her own inner doubts. There was something strange about the Crucible, and the timing of its discovery was suspicious.  
Alice dismissed the thoughts with a shake of her head. ‘And now you have the Reapers making a mess of Thessia,’ she said. ‘I take it you’re not enjoying the new neighbours and their party-time?’  
Tevos jerked like she’d been hit by lightning. Her eyes expanded with shock. ‘How can you joke -? They’re murdering us! They’re destroying everything! My people are dying!’ Tears welled in her eyes.  
Another skycar thrummed past, a wash of cool air rippling over the balcony. The scent of flowers drifted over them again.  
‘Well,’ Alice said, ‘now you know exactly how I’ve been feeling since Earth. And now you know why I’m not overwhelmed with sympathy for you.’  
Tevos looked sick. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me beg. The people on Thessia - they didn’t know! This isn’t their fault!’  
Alice said nothing. She folded her arms and tapped a foot on the floor. Her bootsole clicked against the tiles.  
Tevos turned back to the railings. She rested her hands on it again, hanging her head. The arrogance was apparently spent. She looked exhausted. ‘Please,’ she said quietly. ‘There’ll have to be a reckoning for what we’ve done. I can see that now. And yes, I - I got it wrong.’ She swallowed. The gesture was convulsive. ‘We didn’t mean for anyone to end up - extinct.’ She shuddered as she said the word. ‘We thought we’d be able to stop this, and then a grateful galaxy would turn to us for leadership.’  
Alice said quietly, ‘You disgust me.’  
Tevos nodded, not meeting her eyes. ‘I suppose I deserve that, don’t I? Well, you’re right. Our clever plan has exploded in our face. The end is in sight, and we’re not ready. But, Shepard - Thessia is the galaxy’s largest source of unrefined eezo. If Thessia falls, then that cripples the economy. You have good reason not to like us right now, but losing Thessia won’t help the war effort any. Plus, shedding extra asari bloody won’t bring back anyone you’ve lost on Earth.’  
‘You want me to risk my ship and my crew. To fetch your beacon, don’t you?’ Alice felt the bitterness behind her words. More fetching and carrying - for something that should already have been public!  
‘Yes,’ Tevos said. ‘But not for us. For the Crucible project. Maybe it’s not too late to save something from this fiasco. Perhaps an intact beacon can help. Prothean climax technology is still in advance of ours in some ways. There are things we don’t understand from the beacon, even now.’  
Alice sighed, feeling a leaden sense of dead acceptance in her gut. ‘All right.’  
Tevos looked astonished. ‘You’re - agreeing?’  
‘Yes,’ Alice said, feeling a predatory expression cross her face. ‘But there’s a condition.’  
‘I’m not going to like this, am I?’  
‘Trust me, you’re not meant to. I think there’ve been enough lies. Too much blood had been shed under false pretences. I’m going to stop that.’  
Tevos frowned. ‘How do you propose to accomplish that?’  
‘There’s a reporter on my ship. Diana Allers - you might have heard of her? Works for the Alliance News Network. I have an ... arrangement with her. I feed her stories, she helps us with public relations. And she feeds us intelligence, if her net of contacts find something relevant.’  
Tevos licked her lips, then sighed. ‘You plan to scalp us, don’t you?’ she said.  
‘When I get back to the Normandy, I mean to have a chat with Allers,’ Alice said. ‘I mean to hand her the exclusive of the century. When we go into Thessia, we’ll be recording everything. And I mean everything. I plan to put what you’ve done on the evening news. We’re going to blow this conspiracy right out of the water.’  
Tevos winced. ‘You plan to get me impeached,’ she said.  
Alice shrugged. ‘See my sad-face. But seriously, did you think I was just going to let you walk away with this one?’  
‘I seem to recall your government’s Constitution says something about a politically-neutral military.’  
‘That would be the government that got blown up with Arcturus Station - partly because you chose to ignore all our warnings. Also – I don’t recall the Alliance Constitution saying anything about impartiality toward the Asari Republics.’  
‘All right, I know when I’m beaten,’ Tevos said with evident resignation. ‘If you get to end my career, will you retrieve the beacon from Thessia? And give my people - and yours - some hope?’  
‘Yes,’ Alice said.


End file.
